Bee wonder kids wage spellbinding wars of words

Feb. 25, 2014, 11:37 a.m.

Two young contestants in a US spelling bee competition left their audience spellbound when they verbally duelled for more than four hours on stage, before stunned organisers were forced to call it quits when they ran out of words with which to challenge the pair.

Bee wonder kids wage spellbinding wars of words

Two young contestants in a US spelling bee competition left their audience spellbound when they verbally duelled for more than four hours and 60 rounds on stage, before stunned organisers were forced to call it quits when they ran out of words with which to challenge the pair.

Sophia Hoffman, 11, and Kush Sharma, 13, will return to the stage next month to resume their epic battle once organisers of the Jackson County Spelling Bee in Missouri have had a chance to comb through the dictionary and compile a list of potential new words to stump the children.

Twenty five students started Saturday's championship round at the Kansas City Public Library. They were battling it out for one spot in the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, DC, in May.

After 19 rounds, the group had been whittled down to just two children: Sophia, a year 5 student at Highland Park Elementary School, and Kush, a year 7 student at Frontier School of Innovation.

Last year the winner conquered in 21 rounds. But Saturday's battle proved to be a war of attrition, with Sophia and Kush matching each other word for word, round after round.

Kush rattled off the spellings of "scherzo", "fantoccini" and "intaglio" with ease.

He told the The Kansas City Star newspaper that the hardest word for him was "a French word; I have no idea how to pronounce it. It was a long word." Both he and Sophia missed that one, he said.

Sophia thought "schadenfreude" was tricky. But she nailed it, along with "mahout" and "barukhzy".

As the rounds progressed, organisers realised nervously that they were reaching the end of the Scripps-approved list of 300 words.

During the lunch break, bee officials picked out an additional 20 words from the Merriam-Webster's 11th Edition, The Kansas City Star reported.